Bernanke: Fed Might Vary Pace of Asset Purchases

By Michael Aneiro

Bernanke is in mid-press conference at the moment, following the release of the Fed’s latest policy statement, and in keeping with the modest changes to statement wording he’s not saying anything too radical. Among the highlights, Bernanke says the Fed is considering varying the pace of asset purchases, instead of adhering to fixed monthly bond purchase amounts. He’s reiterated that the Fed’s targets for unemployment and inflation are “thresholds, not triggers” for any changes in Fed policy, and that the “costs remain manageable” of Fed policy even in the face of rising prices of risk assets like stocks and junk bonds.

In response to several questions about Cyprus, he’s downplayed the broader impact, pointing out that markets are up today and that the Cypriot banking system is “a large multiple of the size of its economy.”

Treasuries continue to hold firmly in place. The ten-year note is most recently yielding 1.936%, per Tradeweb data, ever so slightly down from 1.941% right before the statement release a little over an hour ago, and the 30-year bond is yielding 3.170%, from 3.177%.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.